Comparison of the NCEP and DTC Verification Software Packages

The National Centers for Environmental Prediction (NCEP) and the Developmental Testbed Center (DTC) have both developed software packages with the capability to verify model forecasts using several verification methods. NCEP employs both the NCEP Verification System (NVS) and the Quantitative Precipitation Forecast (QPF) Verification System (QVS), while the DTC uses the Model Evaluation Tools (MET) verification package. Both verification packages provide a means to generate partial sums, or raw numbers from which many standard statistical results can be computed and used for evaluating model performance. Since the NCEP verification packages and MET are concurrently being used in testing and evaluating efforts within the broad user community, it is important to ascertain the two systems are producing congruous output. Therefore, a study was performed to establish MET produces output functionally similar to the NCEP verification packages.